Shadows have no form. Light has no substance. It is late afternoon: one of many in this particular January. It is warm enough for fog, but too cold for the exposure of skin, for colors as lurid as spring-time, or for the fringe of sand on the edge of Lake Michigan to hold anything other than leaf-litter and the skeletal remains of summer. On such days, smiles are hard to come by and one seeks warmth, companionship, the brush of a hand in the kindest of caresses. One recalls smiles and idealizes them in the mind’s inner eye. One gives smiles the teeth they may have lacked in reality. Where there are no hands to offer kind caresses, a door-handle may do. Or a lamp-post. Anything with fingerprints on it: the ghost-residue of humans who have passed, humans—passed—who remain alive. Distant. Remote. On such days, their fingerprints are enough. Forensic evidence, begging for contamination. Their fingerprints and your fingerprints, as intermingled and as intimate as sex whispered between bed-sheets. On the days when shadows have no form and when light has no substance…when it is late afternoon—one of many in any given January—it may be possible to seek the caress of a friendly hand in one’s own pocket. On the days when shadows have no form and light has no substance, when it is too cold for the lurid colors of spring, one’s own pockets contain all the warmth a human might need. * I’ve been thinking of the Czech author, Lukas Tomin. I read his novel, Kye while eating chocolate in Prague. I thought of him today. He is as dead and immortal as any author whose words exist in two languages…three languages…or more. He has written, brilliant, phantasmagorical fever dreams and called them novels. Dead and immortal, he is good to read in January, when the light has no substance and the shadows have no form, or when summer is brushed across the beach as its own skeletonized echo. * As always, thank you for viewing, reading, and commenting, and I hope you’re all at the end of a great weekend and the beginning of a great week.